A few days ago, YouTube, the giant videosharing site, unveiled some site upgrades that has a vocal chunk of its user base up in arms. The most important change, from the point of view of YouTube's burgeoning critics, is the removal of social data about videos in all the different categories and its replacement with videos that are being handpicked by the site's editors. People starting to call YouTube "EditorTube" in protest, a are using the site's tools to spread the word.

A new video investigates Rudy Giuliani's "scheduling conflicts" on the day of an African American-themed debate; a video shows that Mitt Romney has invested a tidy sum of money in Iran, despite very public calls for others to divest from the country; some missing John Edwards videos turn up on YouTube; a new social networking site aims at online liberals; Ron Paul raises over $1 million in an end-of-quarter fundraising push; and Newt Gingrich will not be running for president in 2008.

Karl Rove joins Markos Moulitsas at Newsweek, dogs and cats live together; does Media Matters favor Hiillary Clinton over the other dems?; the Iowa Independent predicts the winners of the Iowa caucuses; a video from Brave New Films criticizing Fox News gets banned on Digg; John McCain is up next in the MTV/MySpace Presidential Dialogue series; bloggers galore at the 2008 Democratic convention; get yourself a "We Look Like Facebook" t-shirt today!; and Barack Obama's tech policy is up in super-accessible HTML format.

MoveOn.org Political Action is hiring, looking for someone to work "on the development of cutting edge online organizing tools." The job description lays out an ambitious but not unrealistic plan for the giant e-group, and hints at some significant upgrades in its integration of technology in its field organizing. Can the Right match it?

I spent a few minutes in the future last night, having a late dinner at an Italian restaurant in Santa Monica with Robert Scoble of FastCompany.tv and Loic le Meur of the start-up Seesmic. Both of them are tech pioneers who are working in the emerging world of the world live web. And when they say live, they don't mean simply the part of the web that gets updated often, otherwise known as the blogosphere and the news-sphere. They mean the direct streaming of live events onto the web, along with live feedback from audiences that are highly networked.

I spent most of last night watching the Democratic election returns roll in, with the TV tuned to MSNBC but the sound turned down low, and my laptop in my hands, watching for live reaction and commentary on the event as it unfolded. Twitter, which has now become the web's virtual water-cooler, was my main guide, but while it was fun, I want more. The world live web is arguably already here, perhaps what we need to do is stitch it together a bit better for political events.

I've been on the road since Thursday, first at a working meeting of the Sunlight Foundation in DC with people working on collaborative governance web designing, and then yesterday in Minneapolis at the National Conference on Media Reform (NCMR), where I moderated a panel on the same topic, and today in Houston at a miniconference at the Baker Institute on the internet and politics. A couple of times over the last two days, I managed to pull out the N95 and shot a couple of fun, Qik videos with some of the folks I bumped into at NCMR. Check out Jane Hamsher, Susan Crawford, Robert Greenwald, Deanna Zandt, Craig Newmark and Tom Steinberg.

My friend Jay Rosen noticed a tweet from me earlier where I said I wasn't going to the conventions this year, and instead planned to "watch the web watch the conventions." He wrote back asking how I planned "to add value to and interact with the convention?" Here's an extended version of what I wrote back to him in response.

Let's hope President-elect Barack Obama had a restful Tuesday night, because it's about the only time in the next two and a half months that he won't have someone whispering in his ear with advice on what kind of presidency his should be; Perhaps even more important than the question of who will be the nation's first Chief Technology Officer is the matter of how much real juice he or she will have; As we look forward, let's not forget to look back at how we got to where we are; and more.

It's the story of a scrappy bootstrapped organization thinking it can take on the big boys through grit, long hours, and some of the neatest tools the Internet's ever dreamed up. Nope, it's not the story of Shawn Fanning and Napster or Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com. It's the rise and presidency of Barack Obama, says the New York Times David Carr; Of course, it's still possible to look at this election and see it as simply the triumph of a uniquely able politician, his crafty band of savant strategists, and a favorable political climate. Indeed, the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza writes a 7,000-word "How Obama Won" piece with hardly a mention of the Internet; The Washington Post's Shailagh Murray and Matthew Mosk suggest that the Obama White House will have an even "more ambitious" version of the campaign's 95-member new media department; and a good deal more.